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Bitcoin continued to pull back from last weeks highs today, although at these prices any profit-taking is probably out of desperation rather than strategy. The demand is just not there yet to sustain prices above $10K, at least not during this last week.

On the technical front, Bitcoin is stronger now than it's ever been, and moving towards being even more decentralized with new lightning nodes sprouting up every day. Clearly this is not the primary motivating factor for the price right now. When people are afraid, they don't care about practicalities, so I would suggest there is still a lot of silent fear in the crypto markets right now. Once that fear is alleviated, I would expect a brief moonshot that will leave people behind who were waiting for the right time to buy in. I expect this to happen in March or early April.

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Historical Price Comparisons

	Today's Price	Price 1 Year Ago	365 Day Change	30 Day Change	7 Day Change
Bitcoin	$9,813.07	$1,173.68	+836.09%	-12.85%	-11.69%
Ethereum	$840.52	$13.07	+6430.91%	-20.41%	-13.71%
ETC	$38.84	$1.21	+3209.92%	+33.06%	+11.00%
Monero	$273.79	$11.92	+2296.90%	-13.66%	-15.93%
Litecoin	$209.42	$3.85	+5439.48%	+16.17%	-8.74%
Dogecoin	$0.00632	$0.00021	+3040.38%	-17.52%	-10.29%
Siacoin	$0.02103	$0.00033	+6410.98%	-49.02%	-32.01%
Steem	$3.49	$0.11	+3220.06%	-46.39%	-25.43%

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Today's charts and numbers at a glance

(shift+click or middle-mouse-button any image to enlarge in a new window)

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The total Cryptocurrency market cap today was $432,117,000,000.
Steem Market cap was $932,862,000, or 0.216% of total.

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Today's Crypto Marketshare:
79.26% - Top Ten
40.95% - Top Ten (w/o Bitcoin)
38.31% - Bitcoin
20.74% - Other
0.216% - Steem

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Bitcoin's Price hit a high of $10,597, a low of $9,547 and an average of $10,072 before closing.

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Bitcoin's Market Cap was $173,682,000,000 US Dollars before closing.

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Bitcoin exchange trading totaled a volume of $6,917,930,000 US Dollars.

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The average Bitcoin transaction fee was $6.21 USD.

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There were 161,671 new Bitcoin transactions added to the mempool today, or 1.871 average transactions per second.

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The percentage of Bitcoin transactions using Segwit addresses peaked at 14.81% today.

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The average block contained 1.01 Megabytes of transaction data today.

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Today there were 4,563 new transactions left unconfirmed by end of day.
There were virtually no stale transactions stuck in the mempool.

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Article Spotlight:

Coinbase Informs 13K Affected Customers Of Imminent Data Handover To IRS

This is a new update to a continuing story from 2017, but is relevant all the same.

quoting from the article:

On Friday, Coinbase told the around 13,000 affected customers that the company would be providing their taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and historical transaction records from 2013-2015 to the IRS within 21 days.

These are US Citizens whose accounts had the most transactions on Coinbase.

I don't expect this to be the last time we hear about this, as once the IRS catches someone (and they will... tax agencies will nail you to the wall for leaving out a penny because they assume if you did something once, you've done it many times), this may blow up into an even larger news story if other countries follow suit.

There is also an even bigger issue at hand, in that once the IRS has the information of these 13,000 individuals, including their Bitcoin/altcoin addresses, this may help to map out even more activity on the Bitcoin network, which will undoubtedly help other countries and the U.S. in future investigations.

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Video Spotlights

Crypto Mastery - The Future of Crypto - Scaling, Governance and Holding, Bank of America Fears

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The Moon - $130,000 By 2019 | Logarithmic Scale Bitcoin Price Prediction

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Doug Polk Crypto - CHEAP HOT ALT From Corrupt Dictator!

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Steemfollower

if you want to be more proactive in this community, try using steemfollower (sign in is done through steemconnect using your steemit name and your private posting key - found in your wallet under permissions). This Video will explain how the program works. It is a great way to motivate you to produce great content, and to reward others for producing great content.

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Tip Jar:

Dogecoin DDizpbLrYzFNEZtEVvUXo8kKBKu3K7yLry

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Promotion Bots

Follow this link to see how I track my upvote buying, and how I create the chart below. The data is currently too thin to make any judgement calls, and the way that upvote bots work is explained in this post, meaning this chart should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

I strongly advise to use steembottracker.com when using upvote bots. check the max suggested bid, how long a bot has until it's voting cycle ends, and how many votes have been purchased for that bot by clicking "details." In time you will learn how to read these signs to get a better upvote for your SBD, and even getting it all back to keep promoting your posts.

Recently there was an update being pushed out for upvote bots, and one of the new parameters will involve how much of a bots voting value can be bid on before it returns peoples money. This is a good thing because up until now people could overbid a bot and everyone would get a crappy upvote. This is being changed, and now the chart below will be more relevant than ever, as bots that do not follow the new limitation will find themselves on the bottom of the chart.

Average Steem Dollar Return to Date: -19.83%

(click to enlarge)

*this chart is subject to change over time and only reflects average amount of Steem Dollars that I recuperated from upvote bots I have used. Anything below 0% is a loss.

As I test more upvote bots and learn better strategies the chart will grow and numbers will change. It is not an endorsement for any bot, nor is this an attempt to slander the reputation of any upvote bot, as many of them work the same. I only wish to highlight to others the range of value they should expect if they choose to use upvote bot services. Even if you follow the best strategies for using upvote bots, there is some gambling involved.*

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As always; good luck, good wealth and good health to everyone on Steemit. Stay positive towards others and help the community grow. Thank you for reading and sharing. Comments are always welcome.